Yesterday a friend with good taste in boats asked me if my Tashmoo 18 skiff was for sale. I can understand why he might think so, as it’s been sitting in the middle of the yard for two weeks awaiting a warm day for me to crawl beneath the trailer and slap on some bottom paint before launching for the spring season. Over my dead body I thought. Tashmoos have been out of production since the late 1990s, a Martha’s Vineyard boat built in Vineyard Haven from a mold taken off of a Jonesport lobster boat from Maine. Now they are back.
I bought mine in 1992 after falling in love with the look of the boat in a full page ad that ran in the back of the Eldridge table tables. I needed a little boat to get young children to the beach, something for clamming and fishing, a boat that could handle Vineyard Sound on a bad day. So I placed a call, paid a visit to the Vineyard, took a test ride, and put down my deposit — all in the boat cost me something in the neighborhood of $5000 including a terrible 30-hp Johnson outboard which tormented me until the day it thankfully died.
As my cousin once told me years later: “That boat doesn’t owe you anything.” I should say not. Thirty-four years and three engines later, and I consider my Tashmoo to be the single best purchase I’ve ever made.
Over the years I’ve basked in many compliments about the boat. There’s something about the look of the boat — the sweep of the sheer line, the tumble-home stern, the rugged, non-nonsense interior — that inspires admirers to leave notes on the boat as she rides on her mooring asking me if I ever decide to sell her to please give them a call.
After the company went out of business the only way to get a Tashmoo was to keep an eye on the classifieds and grab a used one locally. There were quite a few on the Vineyard, where they were once given away as grand prizes in the annual Martha’s Vineyard Bluefish & Striped Bass Derby. Islanders nicknamed the boats “Splashmoos” because of their notoriously wet ride, and Nelson Sigelman, the fishing writer for the Martha’s Vineyard Times, wrote a story about adding splash rails to the hull to try to keep himself dry. Even with the rails, mine still soaks me down.
Soundings editor Bill Sisson was a Tashmoo owner, and wrote about the skiff in that newspaper’s pages. In “When the Boats We Own Become a Part of Us“, Sisson wrote:
More than a decade ago, I sold my 18-foot Tashmoo lobster skiff to the town of Vineyard Haven on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass. It was another one of those bittersweet partings, but I was happy she was going back to her home waters.
That simple, surefooted “seagoing miniature” was a direct descendant of an old wooden skiff that Dan West had found in a salt marsh on the island. He pulled a plug off the tired workboat and started producing them in glass.
Vineyard Haven harbormaster Jay Wilbur saw my ad, knew the boat’s pedigree and put her to work in the harbor earning her keep. Every few years I either hear from Jay or I check in with him just to keep track of the old boat. “I just got out of it,” Jay told me when I called in mid-July. “We have a new high-deck patrol boat that’s also wonderful, but in the summer, I spend my time in the Tashmoo. It just fits me better. They’re just great boats.”
Now, after 30 years, the Tashmoo is back. I just got off the phone with David Reiter. He revived the design after tracking down the original molds in Portland, Maine and hauled them down to Florida. He’s started Tashmoo Boatworks and is preparing to go into production with a very new take on the old classic.
The new and improved Tashmoo Skiff’s debut at the 2026 Palm Beach Boat Show
Talk about boat bling. The new Tashmoo is a serious gem. I love mine because it thrives on squid ink, bluefish blood, and black clam mud. The Florida version is all teak and shiny goodness. Here’s a story in Soundings, “Tashmoo Skiffs Return” heralding the rebirth of the boat.
The artist Bethany Collins was the subject of a recent (2026.03.04) story in the New York Times about her four-month transcription of Moby Dick with a nib pen on onionskin paper.
As an occasional transcriber of whaling ship logbooks, and having “digitized” The Reminiscences of Captain Thomas Chatfield” twenty years ago, I can relate to her comment that the process “It felt ritualistic, like meditation.”
The process of writing out another author’s work — to learn or to be inspired — is known as “copywork” and has been used by many authors to learn the rhythms and language choices of the greats.
Hunter Thompson re-typed The Great Gatsby and A Farewell to Arms, according to John-Paul Flintoff, writing “Why I Copy Out Great Writing By Hand” in Idler. Jack London copied Kipling’s work. Like Thompson, Joan Didion copied Hemingway to explore how his sentences were crafted.
Thanks to Jim Forbes for sharing Elly Fishman’s story in the New York Times.
Beginning this spring, most operators of a motor boat in Massachusetts must pass a boating safety class and have in their possession a certificate/license. The law, known as the Hanson-Milone Act, was signed into law by Governor Healy on January 8, 2025 and goes into effect for boaters born after January 1, 1989 on April 1, 2026. Enforcement won’t begin until September 2026, meaning boaters under 37 years of age will probably be given a warning if caught without a license during the 2026 summer boating season. All boat operators must comply by April 1, 2028. (kids under 12 may not operate a boat unless accompanied a certified adult over 18). The law only applies to motorized watercraft, including “personal watercraft,” (e.g. JetSkis) – meaning that sailboats without auxiliary engines, rowboats, canoes, and kayaks are exempt.
The law, filed by a state representative from Kingston, is named in memory of David Hanson of Kingston, who drowned when his 15-foot fishing boat capsized off of Plymouth in early May, 2010. The law is also named in honor of the late Paul Milone, the former Weymouth harbormaster. The law was widely supported by the state’s harbormaster and marine trades associations.
There are two ways to get a certificate. The “free” way involves attending an in-person course that lasts from 10 to 12 hours. and is usually conducted over multiple days. The more convenient way to take the course and obtain a license is to do it online via the state-approved provider, Boat-Ed. That will cost you $45, and, depending on your experience and prior knowledge, can be completed in a few hours if you skip the inane story line about a bunch of clueless teens setting out to solve a mystery involving mutant insects and an irrelevant boat theft on an inland lake.
Now for my opinion on the whole matter (and you know I have one). Putting aside any libertarian resentment of the nanny-state, hand-wringing state reps, and my utter loathing of the inane content that Boat-Ed forced on me during its puerile online course, there is no question that the general nautical IQ on the water has plummeted in recent years, especially since sailing seems to be dwindling and motorized boating rising. The majority of motorboat operators are morons. Always have been and always will be. They buy or rent a boat, turn a key, cast off, and hit the high seas with zero knowledge of the rules of the road or basic safety measures. They can’t read a chart, depend on a GPS, and generally treat a boat as a floating version of a car. They head out of the harbor in 15-foot open boats in early May, get swamped, and die of hypothermia. They pound a cooler full of White Claws in the August sun and drag the kids around on inflatable rafts. Most of their equipment is still wrapped in plastic after they bought their boat at the boat show.
The average nautical IQ plummeted during the Covid summer of 2020 when the masses headed to the high seas for some social distancing. Suddenly center consoles with four outboard engines were de rigeur. These were not salty people who grew up on the water, took sailing lessons as kids, and could tell a sheepshank from a bowline.
Yes, boating licenses make sense. But if you have sixty years of experience on the water and find yourself sitting at a computer taking a boating safety course designed for mouth breathers you are going to clench your teeth, and realize that what passes for competency on the water is little more than knowing how to use a fire extinguisher and staying on the right side of a channel marker. One example of the course’s glaring shortcomings: the online course made zero mention of the dangers of “bow riding” where a passenger dangles their legs over the prow of the boat and becomes propellor bait.
I predict this new law will accomplish nothing more than give the Massachusetts Environmental Police and local harbormasters an excuse to board boats and issue a demand to “show me your papers.” It can’t replace experience and common sense, and will definitely instill a false sense of confidence in people who have no business being on the water in the first place. The only upside of the new license is that you only have to pass it once for the license is good for life.
Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the Sunday New York Times (2026.02.08) published proof that A.I. has finally found its true calling:
Ms. Rompoti began writing romance novels with the help of artificial intelligence in 2024, using the program Sudowrite. As a plus-size woman, Ms. Rompoti wanted to see heavier-set heroines she could relate to in romance fiction.
A.I. supercharged her writing process, enabling her to produce 10 novels in little over a year, including “The Billionaire’s Curvy Match” and “Curves to Own: Pregnant by the Billionaire.”
I wanted to put a plug in for Cindy Nickerson’s “Curator’s Corner” in the monthly newsletter of the Historical Society of Santuit and Cotuit. The latest edition, dated February 1, 2026, has a wonderful essay: “Death and Danger at Deep Hole” which explores the history of shipwrecks off of Cotuit in the 19th century.
In the piece, Cindy describes the “Melancholy Death by Drowning” by Captain Oliver A. Nickerson of Cotuit Port in April 1852; the 1867 wreck of the Hannah Martin; and the tragic February 1829 wreck of the Hyannis packet sloop Caroline which went ashore off Cotuit Bay in a snowstorm, forcing her crew ashore on Sampson’s Island where the captain’s sons, 13-year old Ebenezer Scudder and 19 year-old James died of exposure.
Cindy’s fascinating piece is just one of many benefits of membership in the HSSC.
David Hill, Lenovo and IBM’s former head of design and brand identity, and the man who redefined corporate blogging twenty years ago with the late, lamented Design Matters blog, has a new website.
ThinkNextDesign reflects the man’s impeccable design taste and showcases his greatest hits in a graceful gallery of everything from minicomputers to Trackpoint caps for the pointing stick on Thinkpads.
It also revives some of his best writing from Design Matters, the Lenovo blog the two of us reminiscenced about last month with Thomas Rogers, host of the podcast Laptop Retrospective.
Design is far more than form or function. It’s the tangible expression of a brand’s identity, values, and promise. While a brand defines what a company stands for, design gives those aspirations form and substance. Design uniquely delivers value: visually, physically, and experientially.
I woke up in the dark of this very cold January morning, with the furnace chugging away and ice skimming over Cotuit Bay, and my thoughts turned a dozen miles south from where I write, to a bleak scene that unfolded 108 years ago in the middle of Nantucket Sound when the Cross Rip lightship was solidly locked in and lost during the Great Freeze of 1918.
The end of January and beginning of February are the heart of the meteorological winter on Cape Cod, and on schedule the Great Freeze commenced on January 21, 1918 when temperatures plunged to zero and didn’t rise above that bleak point for five days. It was so cold (how cold was it Dave?) that Providence, Rhode Island reported a brutal 17 degrees below zero, and Narragansett Bay froze solid, blocking any vessels from entering or departing Newport. Buzzards Bay was locked tight with ice from the Canal to Quick’s Hole in the Elizabeth Islands. Nantucket Sound was frozen from Woods Hole east to Great Point on Nantucket. The island of Nantucket was cut off from ferry service and supplies for more than two weeks.
In the middle of the Sound sat LV-6 — the Cross Rip lightship — a 60-year old, 80-foot long former coastal schooner converted into a navigational aid by the US Lighthouse Service. Her three masts had been chopped down and replaced by an iron skeleton mast. She had once been stationed for years five miles south of Cotuit on Succonnesset Shoals but moved to Cross Rip in 1915, one of a half-dozen lightships stationed across the Sound to guide shipping through the tangle of shoals from Hedge Fence to Shovelful Shoal east of Great Point. Each lightship in “Lightship Alley” (described as a “conga-line”) displayed a unique set of lights, sounded a distinctive fog signal, and were painted different colors to aid in their identification. Before the Cape Cod Canal opened in 1914, thousands of ships passed through Vineyard and Nantucket Sounds every year, threading their way past Hedge Fence, Succonnesset, Horseshoe Shoal, Handkerchief Shoal at the southern tip of Monomoy, before entering the open seas of the Atlantic to round the outer Cape on their way to Boston and Maine.
The Cross Rip lightship was manned by six Cape Codders. Her captain, Richard E.B. Phillips was home at Dennisport on a scheduled furlough, leaving mate Henry F. Joy, also of Dennisport, in command. The ship was stationed south of Horseshoe and north of Norton Shoals at the virtual midpoint of the thirty-mile wide expanse of Nantucket Sound. Aboard with Joy were: the ship’s machinist, Francis M. Johnson of Yarmouth; the cook, William Rose of North Harwich; seamen Almon F. Wixon and Arthur C. Joy of Dennisport, and E.H. Phillips of West Dennis.
Lightship duty was tedious during the best of weather, and terrible the rest of the time. The ships had no engines or sails to speak of, and were moored to massive anchors in rough waters, especially the lightships at the eastern entrance to the Sound which were exposed to the full impact of the Atlantic Ocean. One lightship crewman once expressed his hatred of lightship life and declared he’d prefer to be convicted and send to state prison. The lightships had an unnerving habit of dragging anchor and being blown off station. In late December, 1867, the first Cross Rip lightship parted its anchor cable in a vicious blizzard and was blown out of Nantucket Sound into the open Atlantic where she started to sink. A passing ship bound from Maine to New Orleans saved the crew and carried them all the way to Louisiana. The Handkerchief lightship drifted 50 miles southwest from Monomoy to No Man’s Land south of Martha’s Vineyard in 1879. According to Thomas Leach’s excellent history, The Lightships of Nantucket Sound, “The Pollock Rip lightship became known as “the Happy Wanderer” for the number of times it moved off station or broke free.” During the 1944 hurricane, the 12 men aboard Vineyard Lightship #73 lost their lives when the ship sank off of Cuttyhunk. According to Captain W. Russell Webster, the official records “contain 273 instances of lightships being blown adrift or dragged off station in severe weather or moving ice. Five lightships were lost under such conditions.”
The crews of the lightships kept the lights shining and the fog signal ringing or blowing. They also went to the aid of stricken vessels. In 1914, the crew of the Cross Rip lightship —under the command of Captain Phillips — helped rescue the crew of the three-masted schooner John Paul that foundered in the Sound during a January blizzard. The crews were regularly relieved and brought ashore for brief breaks, but they also could be stranded past their scheduled tour of duty if conditions made it impossible for the relief boat to reach them.
By late January 1918 Nantucket Sound was completely frozen over. A rare occurrence, the ice meant no shipping could traverse the Sound, making the Cross Rip lightship’s mission irrelevant. As provisions dwindled on the ship and the harsh conditions made life intolerable and precarious. Chief Mate Henry Joy is said to have walked across the ice to the coast guard station on Nantucket to ask for permission to abandon the ship. Ordered to return, he dejectedly walked back to his doom.
Boston Sunday Post, February 2, 1918
On February 4 the pressure of the ice pack around the Cross Rip caused her to part her mooring cables. Rising temperatures thawed the ice and it started to move with the strong tidal currents, carrying the trapped lightship with it out to sea. On February 5, the lightkeeper at Nantucket’s Great Point light spotted the trapped ship sliding helplessly out of the Sound, past the light, and into the open Atlantic. Her ensign was flying upside down, the maritime signal of extreme distress.
The Nantucket Inquirer and Mirror of 16 February, 1918 reported: “Considerable concern is felt for the safety of the little Cross Rip lightship, which was dragged from her moorings in Nantucket Sound, about twelve miles north of this island, by the heavy ice which started moving by the 50-mile northwest wind between Monday night and Tuesday morning, when the record low temperature was recorded all over New England.
“The lightship gradually swept through the sound, rounding Great Point still fast in the ice, absolutely helpless; and early Tuesday afternoon she passed out of sight by Great Round shoal in the direction of the dreaded Rose and Crown shoals, where the bones of many a good vessel now rest.”
The news of LV-6’s plight spread. Ships were dispatched by the US Navy and Coast Guard to find the missing lightship. Frederick B. Thurber, commander of a minesweeper stationed in Newport, RI, recalled the search in the March 1962 issue of the United States Naval Institute’s journal Proceedings:
“During this period the Cross Rip Light Ship went adrift around Great Point on the northeast point of Nantucket, drifted over the shoals, and sank with all hands. The Commander of the Mine Force had made repeated requests for radio, as at times we were sweeping 40 or 50 miles off the beach but the answer came back that the sweepers did not rate it. After my report that if we had had a radio, we could have gotten to the Cross Rip Light Ship before she grounded and could have saved the men, a radio was supplied.”
The search for LV-6 was called off on February 18. The Hyannis Patriot reported, “Naval vessels have searched far and wide for the ship daily since she was swept from view in the midst of an ice field so extensive that it was impossible for steamers to force their way through.”
In early March 1918, the worst fears about the fate of the Cross Rip lightship were confirmed when fishermen aboard the fishing schooner Kineo more than 100 miles away on Georges Bank dragged up in their nets a small flag and a boat rudder stamped with the words “Cross Rip.”
More wreckage was dredged from the sea in 1933 by the government dredge W.L. Marshall while working at the eastern entrance to the Sound. According to the New Bedford Standard Times, “Workmen drew … attention to splintered bits of oak ribs and planks which blocked suction pumps several times. An eight-inch piece of a broken windlass was also sucked up.”
In the 1960s a New Bedford dragger found theship’s bell off of Nauset Beach in Orleans. The lightship’s wooden quarter board was found on the beach at Dennisport’s Depot Street in 1919, coincidentally the same street where mate Henry Joy lived. It is on display at the Josiah Dennis Manse Museum’s maritime room.
The missing Cross Rip lightship was soon replaced by a relief ship, and the last lightship in Nantucket Sound was retired in 1969, the need for the vessels done in by the Cape Cod Canal and modern navigational aids such as LORAN and eventually GPS.
The Viking explorer Erik the Red pulled an epic branding stunt in the 9th century when he named Greenland “Grœnland” to entice more Norsemen to its definitely-not-green shores from Iceland. Green it is not: save for a few meager patches of vegetation that struggle to survive along the southern coast in the short summer months.
As our President heads to Europe flexing his imperial ambitions to take Greenland away from the Danes, it’s worth revisiting the island’s history with America and revisiting Sloan Wilson’s great novel, Ice Brothers, about his experiences patrolling the frozen coast during World War II.
Colonialism and American Claims
One thing to note about the prehistoric settlement of the island is that the first settlements (which didn’t survive) were made by people migrating from North America. Also worth noting is that the present population of Inuits migrated east across the Northwest Passage in 1200, afterErik the Red established the first Norse settlements.
Those Viking settlements died out and it wasn’t until the early 1700s that the Danes sent missionaries to Greenland to convert whatever Norse people were living there from their pagan ways to Christianity. Finding no surviving Norse, the missionaries baptised the Inuit, set up some coastal trading stations and other than European whalers working in the Davis Strait, the place moldered until the 19th century when Danish interest intensified.
American made territorial claims on northern Greenland in the late 19th century when the Arctic explorer Robert Peary explored the coast and established for the first time that the landmass did not extend all the way to the North Pole. In 1917 the US conceded its claims to Greenland when it bought the Virgin Islands from Denmark.
World War II
Greenland first gained strategic importance during the Battle of the Atlantic. Henrik Kaufman, Danish minister to the United States, signed a treaty with the USA permitting the building of stations and bases on Greenland. Apparently Kaufman didn’t tell anyone in the Danish government about his concession and he was accused of “high treason” and fired. The Americans built 14 bases on Greenland in WWII, using them to ferry aircraft to Europe and as naval bases to counter the threat of German U-Boats.
The Germans also established weather stations on the east coast to provide them with early forecasts of weather systems moving across the Atlantic in what has been termed the “North Atlantic Weather War.” Sloan Wilson’s 1979 Ice Brothers is a fictional account of Wilson’s experiences with the U.S. Coast Guard and the cat-and-mouse game that took place between the Americans and Germans during the war.
I can’t, and won’t opine on President Trump’s designs on Greenland aside from pointing out the U.S. has enjoyed, for more than a century, a history of territorial claims, military bases, and a record of patrolling and supporting its frozen neighbor to the northeast.
I’ll end with Rockwell Kent’s painting, Early November, North Greenland, 1933
Bob Weir passed away today (1.10.26) at the age of 78. His Ace album was the soundtrack of one of my favorite summers in the early 70s. Singing “Black-Throated Wind” while hitchhiking back to college through New Bedford on a dismal grey day is a memory to hang onto.
